Lady Joker: Volume 2

'One of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction' David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero

One of Japan's great modern writers, this second half of Lady Joker brings Kaoru Takamura's breathtaking masterpiece to a gripping conclusion.

Five men who meet at a Tokyo racetrack every week carry out a heist. They have kidnapped the CEO of Japan's largest beer company to extract blood money from the company's corrupt financiers.

Known as Lady Joker, the men make their first attack on the beer company when their demands are not met. As the attacks escalate, the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are exposed, the stakes rise, and bring into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. Some will lose everything, even their lives.

Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case that terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines this watershed episode in modern Japanese history.

'A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts' Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

“Lady Joker is one of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year - author of Tokyo Year Zero A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts - author of The Memory Police A fascinating slow burn of a book, detailed, complex and immersive - Guardian A tense psychological thriller - Times Literary Supplement Takamura's prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society - New York Times”

Hallelujah! Inspired by the real-life, still unsolved Glico-Morinaga kidnapping and extortion case which led to the nationwide hunt for "The Monster with Twenty-one Faces," Kaoru Takamura's Lady Joker is at last available in translation; epic in its scale and vision, yet gripping from first to last, this is one of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year -- David Peace, author of TOKYO YEAR ZERO
A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts -- Yoko Ogawa, author of THE MEMORY POLICE
Takamura's prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society New York Times
Lady Joker is a work you get immersed in, like a sprawling 19th century novel or a TV series like The Wire . . . Lady Joker casts a page-turning spell NPR
Like Ellroy's American Tabloid and Carr's The Alienist, the book uses crime as a prism to examine dynamic periods of social history . . . Takamura's blistering indictment of capitalism, corporate corruption and the alienation felt by characters on both sides of the law from institutions they once believed would protect them resonates surprisingly with American culture Los Angeles Times
Excellent . . . Takamura shows why she's one of Japan's most prominent mystery novelists Publishers Weekly
Takamura's challenging, genre-confounding epic offers a sweeping view of contemporary Japan in all its complexity Kirkus Reviews
Sprawling, addictive, this X-Ray examination of a society where the have and the have nots (including the police) play a slow, inexorable dance towards catastrophe, turns into a fascinating piece of work and I look forward to its conclusion Crime Time
A fascinating slow burn of a book, detailed, complex and immersive Guardian
Meticulously plotted complexity Times Literary Supplement
By its sheer breadth, humanity, and the range of characters who walk across its pages, Lady Joker is comparable to the great 19th-century novels. It is a tremendous accomplishment Chicago Review of Books
Lady Joker is a towering achievement -- Paul Tremblay, author of THE CABIN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Like all literature, readers will take what they want from Takamura's critique of Japanese society, but at the heart of the epic novel is a gripping crime story where the actual crime itself is almost secondary to the psychological ripples it sends through the boardrooms, police stations, press offices and homes of anyone connected. This is much more of a whydunit than a whodunit - and one that was well worth the wait

The Japan Times

Takamura joins American writers James Ellroy, author of American Tabloid, and Don Winslow, author of several novels about the drug trade, to illuminate a society in which power and money matter far more than morality. All three write mysteries that also function as morality plays . . . Bravura

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Brilliantly dark

Ms. Magazine

A complex work of stunning breadth and depth by a master of the genre

Kirkus Reviews

Admirers of intricate crime fiction, which both engages the intellect and offers insights into the hidden parts of a society, will hope for further translations of this gifted author's work

Publishers Weekly

Kaoru Takamura was born in Osaka in 1953 and is the author of thirteen novels. Her debut, Grab the Money and Run, won the 1990 Japan Mystery and Suspense Grand Prize, and since then her work has been recognized with many of Japan's most prestigious awards for literary fiction as well as for crime fiction: the Naoki Prize, the Noma Literary Award, the Yomiuri Prize, the Shinran Prize, the Jiro Osaragi Prize, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, and the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize. Lady Joker, her first novel to be translated into English, received the Mainichi Arts Award and has been adapted into both a film and a television series.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Fuminori Nakamura. She was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders, and she maintains the database Japanese Literature in English.

Marie Iida has served as an interpreter for the New York Times bestselling author Marie Kondo's Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Her nonfiction translations have appeared in Nang, MoMA Post, Eureka and over half a dozen monographs on contemporary Japanese artists and architects, including Yayoi Kusama, Toyo Ito, and Kenya Hara for Rizzoli New York. Marie currently writes a monthly column for Gentosha Plus about communicating in English as a native Japanese speaker

'One of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction' David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero This second half of Lady Joker, by Kaoru Takamura, the Grand Dame of Japanese crime fiction, concludes the breathtaking saga introduced in Volume I.Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case that terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. As the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are brought to light, the stakes rise, and some of the professionals we have watched try to fight their way through this crisis will lose everything-some even their lives. Will the culprits ever be brought to justice? More importantly-what is justice? 'A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts' Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

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